Advanced Website Analysis for OSINT

Published: Jun 5, 2018

Many OSINT investigations are tied to using our bread and butter sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. I like to think that overall we are pretty good at extracting data from those platforms and leveraging the information found there.

Occasionally I get requests from Hunchly customers where they are looking to dive deeper into a target website to see how data is being displayed or they are looking for opportunities to automate data collection from a site that is not just static HTML.

I preach it often, but your most powerful tool is your web browser and in particular, it is no surprise that we are big fans of Google Chrome at Hunchly HQ.

Google Chrome comes loaded with tools that can assist you in digging into non-standard data sources that a website may offer.

In this video I will demonstrate how to use Google Chrome tools to dig into a target website that is streaming data about ships and aircraft around the world and displaying it on a map. For extra fun the data that is being passed around is in a custom format that we need to figure out in order to extract the information we are after.

You will learn how I approach analyzing a site like this, and along the way understand some of the tools available to you within Google Chrome.

Advanced Website Analysis for OSINT Video — Enlarge to Fullscreen for Best Viewing

As a bonus, I also walk through how to write a Python script to automate the process of grabbing and decoding the data that the site provides. You can check this video out below:

If you have any questions or have another site that you would like me to analyze on-screen just shoot me an email: justin@hunch.ly